Hillary’s Karl Rove

This is rather funny:

Penn-Blackwater link puts HRC on defense

Hillary Clinton found herself defending her chief strategist Friday after The Associated Press reported that the public relations company Mark Penn runs had helped prepare the chief of the controversial military contractor Blackwater USA for his congressional testimony.

“Mark Penn did no work on the Blackwater account,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said Friday afternoon.

Burson-Marsteller, of which Penn is Worldwide President and CEO, “has cut its ties to Blackwater and that was the right thing to do. Mark is and remains a valuable member of our team,” Wolfson said.

Penn’s unusual dual role as corporate executive and presidential strategist has been a running source of distraction for Clinton’s typically single-minded campaign. Though her supporters believe that voters will ultimately be unlikely to make their choice based on the actions of a consultant who is little known outside political circles, Penn has drawn a steady stream of criticism from other campaigns and from key Democratic groups.

Labor leaders objected to his firm’s work against union organizing, and Burson-Marsteller’s work for clients that include the tobacco industry and a leading, troubled subprime mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, have also drawn fire.

“Bush has been a perfect example of cronyism, because Blackwater has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republicans and to President Bush. I also saw this morning that Sen. Clinton’s primary adviser, Mark Penn, who is like her Karl Rove — his firm is representing Blackwater,” former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said in Iowa Friday.

“I think it is important for Iowa caucus-goers to understand the choices they have in this election. And it is the reason I continue to say we don’t want to replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats.”

Sure, it is campaign politics and one campaign hitting another through the media. But it will raise a few questions in people's minds. The inside baseball stuff of politics is sometimes lost on the general public. This one might not be. There are a lot of people - on the left and right - who really do not like Hillary. This one might get some real legs.

Burma Junta Offers Tokens

Even AFP is not buying this one. The military junta in Burma is offering concessions to the opposition in an attempt to cool international disgust over the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. And oddly, even the AFP appears to be recognizing that the United States is leading the efforts to force changes.

YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar's junta Saturday tried to cool growing UN pressure over its deadly crackdown on peaceful protests, offering talks with democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and relaxing its blockage of the Internet.

But analysts warned that the rare gestures offered by the regime appeared to be token efforts to stave off tougher UN action demanded by the United States and other Western countries.

Faced with the biggest protests against military rule in nearly two decades, Myanmar's government launched a bloody crackdown in late September that left at least 13 dead and more than 2,000 locked up.

Across Asia, activists on Saturday took to the streets in cities from Sydney to Bangkok, kicking off a global day of protest against Myanmar's bloody crackdown on dissent.

Hundreds rallied outside Sydney's iconic Opera House, while in Melbourne 1,000 people marched, some carrying red banners that read "no more bloodshed."

Agam has a post up about the day of protest.

A side note here. The country's name is Burma, not Myanmar. The latter is a name forced on it by the junta after the last massacre, as is "Yangon" instead of Rangoon. When - and if - the people of Burma change the name of the country, the west should accept it. Until then, any wire service, government or commenter that uses the name imposed by the junta is playing into the hands of that group of thugs.

Free Burma.

“Defining Atrocity”

Jim Hoft posts about the lament of the New York Times that murder charges have been (or soon will be) dropped against all of the US Marines charged in connection with the Haditha incident. They lament that:

Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.

Jim rounds up the NYT articles since John "Unindicted ABSCAM Co-Conspirator" Murtha pronounced the Marines guilty of cold-blooded murder. And it is pretty damning stuff for the old gray lady. Go over and read it. But pay special attention to their lament:

Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.

For the New York Times, the "defining atrocity" must be conducted by Americans. Not the jihadis who saw people's heads off on video. Not the jihadis who push the bit of an electric drill through their captive's knees. Not the jihadis who mutilate American soldiers. Not the jihadis who detonate trucks filled with explosives and chlorine gas cylinders in crowds of civilians. Not the jihadis who are killing more Muslims than the Americans ever could. The left in this country has continually cheapened and trivialized the real meaning of words, twisting them into something that can call an American politician "the worst person in the world" while ignoring the depravities of the real thugs in the world.

This is a new low. And I think maybe it is the defining anti-American self-outing of the New York Times.

It Don’t Cost No Money, You Got To Pay With Your Heart

I've mentioned before that David Bromberg is one of my favorite musicians. Well, another video clip from him has surfaced on YouTube (it looks to have been posted by the video's producer). It is from 1984, a high energy performance of Oh, Sharon. Enjoy. (No embedding on this one, you'll have to hop over to YouTube to see it.)

Throw Another Moth On The Barbie

Australians are being urged to crunch a bunch of nice, fresh bogong moths as a snack. Just to help keep the darn things under control. Mind you, they are not exactly health food. They contain high levels of arsenic and 3 ounces contain more fat than a Big Mac.

After years of being encouraged to "throw another shrimp on the barbie", Australians are now being urged instead to tuck into the bogong moths that are plaguing many parts of the country.

The "munch a moth" campaign is being led by Jean-Paul Bruneteau, 51, a French-born chef who is regarded as a worldwide pioneer of such delights as smoked emu, lemon myrtle and bunya nuts.

He first began eating the brown bogong moths 11 years ago while researching a book on "bush tucker" eaten by Aborigines.

"They have a lovely popcorn flavour, like hazelnut," he said.

Mr Bruneteau, who has run "bush tucker" restaurants in Sydney and Paris, suggests pulling off the "furry" wings, then popping the moths in the oven for three minutes in a splash of canola oil.

Alternatively the chef, who trained in the Royal Australian Navy, recommends putting them through a coffee blender and sprinkling the resulting powder into an omelette, pancake or crepe.

Bogong moths and cat casserole. Remind me to bring my own food if I visit down under.

Flexible Armor

I just found this item on Sky News. It is a product called D3o that is soft and flexible - until it is hit. On impact, it becomes quite rigid and is being incorporated into protective gear for snow sports already. It is also undergoing testing by American police for possible use in riot equipment.

A revolutionary new foam has been developed which its makers claim can protect people from pain and injury when they hit something at speed - or when something hits them.

Bikers, cyclists, snowboarders and skiers could benefit from wearing suits and helmets containing D3O, and riot police in the US are putting it through its paces.

When I went to see its inventor, Richard Palmer, he said he was so confident of its miraculous properties that he would put some of it into his beanie hat and let me smash him over the head with a shovel.

He assured me it would not hurt, no matter how hard I whacked him.

When I hit him the first time, I was reluctant to put much effort into it fearing he would collapse and pass out. No reaction.

I swung the shovel over my head and hit him harder. Still no reaction!

They have video as well. They take a few good whacks at knees and the head with a shovel and no reaction at all. It only works where the skin is thin over bone, it will not work to protect soft tissue. But then, most impact damage from a fall is to things like knees and head. Here's the D3o Labs website and here is a Wikipedia entry on it. Technovelgy has covered it as well. This is some pretty neat stuff.

Rumors Confirmed

ABC News is reporting that the Israeli airstrike on a target inside Syria last month was, indeed, targeting some sort of nuclear facility. As I posted a little while ago regarding the nuclear rumors:

So, is it true? I have no idea. Neither, I suspect, do the reporters. What we do know is this: the Israeli government is not saying much of anything. In a country where leaking to the press is considered an art form - nothing. What is even more important: Syria, after a brief bit of whining, has shut up completely. They are silent about this whole incident. If they were innocent, they would be screaming from the rooftops. But, no, they are quiet.

Logically, the conclusion then is that something very, very important was hit by the Israelis. Syria does NOT want the world to hear about what exactly got pounded. So this could be the real deal. Maybe yes, maybe no. But it is - completely - plausible.

ABC is reporting that it is not just plausible. It is exactly what they hit.

In early July the Israelis presented the United States with satellite imagery that they said showed a nuclear facility in Syria. They had additional evidence that they said showed that some of the technology was supplied by North Korea.

One U.S. official told ABC's Martha Raddatz the material was "jaw dropping" because it raised questions as to why U.S. intelligence had not previously picked up on the facility.

Officials said that the facility had likely been there for months if not years.

"Israel tends to be very thorough about its intelligence coverage, particularly when it takes a major military step, so they would not have acted without data from several sources," said ABC military consultant Tony Cordesman.

They go on to report that the Bush administration was extremely cautious after having been burned with Iraq intelligence. But Israel went ahead. Kevin Drum picked up something that also indicates that whatever they hit had to have been of extreme importance:

U.S. aerospace industry and retired military officials indicated today that [the Israelis used] a technology like the U.S.-developed "Suter" airborne network attack system….The technology allows users to invade communications networks, see what enemy sensors see and even take over as systems administrator so sensors can be manipulated into positions so that approaching aircraft can't be seen, they say.

….A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have paid for the Syrian acquisitions."

Obviously I'm just playing amateur sleuth here, but it doesn't seem like you'd tip your hand about the capabilities of technology like this in order to destroy a bunch of rocket launchers and North Korean Scuds. The mission had to be important enough to make it worth letting the Syrians (and the Iranians and the Russians) know that their air defenses had been compromised. They might figure out how to fix it next time, after all. So maybe there was some North Korean nuclear technology there after all.

There is simply no conceivable target so valuable that the Israelis (and the US) would allow such a system to be given away other than nukes. Once it is known that a system like that exists, it's useful life is limited to days or weeks. The Russians are extremely good at reverse engineering.

Syria is still not saying a word about the strike and has not asked the UN for any action. Israel is still very quiet. North Korea is suddenly willing to cut a deal to dismantle their nuclear program. All the indirect evidence points to only one conclusion.

Yes, But Is It Art?

Interesting little feature from ABC News today. Did 4-year old Marla Olmstead actually paint abstract art that was favorably compared to the work of Picasso or did she get help from her father? Nobody can answer that definitively, least of all the guy who just filmed a documentary about Marla and her art. Titled My Kid Could Paint That, the film was released Friday.

Marla Olmstead was only 4 years old when she took the art world by storm — exalted as a painting prodigy, she was compared by some to Picasso.

Documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev set out to tell the young painter's story and explore what constitutes abstract art. He spent countless hours with Marla and her parents, Laura and Mark, at their home in Binghamton, N.Y.

"We don't actively promote her art at all. The only venue to see her art work is a website […] as far as us being here today, it's really just because we feel like we don't want 'My Kid Could Paint That' to be the last true and only word about our family," Marla's mother Laura Olmstead told Kate Snow in an Exclusive, live interview on Good Morning America Weekend.

The film, "My Kid Could Paint That," which was released Friday, did not turn out quite like anyone had expected, including Bar-Lev or the Olmsteads.

"The reality is it's a simple story. The media takes a story and does what they will with it. Ultimately, there are regrets […]I felt very much like the pressure that was put on us and the pressure I put upon Marla I regret that and I feel a lot to blame," Marla's father, Mark Olmstead said.

While he takes the blame for the pressure, Olmstead vehemently denies painting the pictures on his daughter's behalf.

60 Minutes ran a story on Marla which quoted art experts saying that there was no way she could have painted the pictures. Bar-Lev himself is torn. He has a hard time believing that the pictures are hers, but also that the Olmsteads would exploit their daughter. This is one of those media circus events where you end up feeling bad for the kid no matter what the story actually is.

On a brighter note, you too can be a Picasso! Yes, folks, even people with no artistic talent at all can paint their very own Picasso with Mister PicassoHead!

Ninja Nanny Neatly Nabbed

Well, the long, strange trip is finally over for the Ninja Nanny of Decatur. This is the goat who has led the locals on a merry chase for weeks now. (Earlier posts here, here and here.) All it took was getting the right expert involved. A sheep dog.

From the first time someone spotted the black nanny goat running into Decatur traffic, she seemed to be on everyone’s A-list. Her elusiveness brought her legendary status, as she became slicker than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in avoiding the law.

Calls and e-mails of sightings poured into The Daily from readers. A golfer tried to capture her in his cart at Decatur Country Club, a posse of city animal control officials gave chase and police tried to subdue her by stunning her with a Taser, which she neatly dodged.

All it took was a call to Decatur sheep farmer Chet Ellis. He captured Baasheba after his border collie, Jim, cornered her Friday in the backyard of a home on Country Club Lane.

Ellis, 75, said Mindy Gilbert from Decatur Animal Control first phoned him a week ago.

“She said she heard I had a dog that could catch a goat,” he said. “I said, ‘I think he can.’ ”

While earlier capture attempts closely resembled old Mack Sennett movies, this one was highly professional. Jim the border collie had the goat cowed in under ten minutes.

The Wrong Target

Kerry Howley, writing in the Los Angeles Times, points out that the people arguing to pressure China over Burma are just plain wrong. China actually has little, if any, influence over the xenophobic military junta that rules that benighted country. China's economic ties are not as strong as is being implied by some and, worse, China actually backed the wrong side in a long, bloody civil war. Howley has some real credentials to know what she is talking about - she worked in Burma for a newspaper.

These are supposed to be humbling times for foreign policy analysts — chaos in Iraq having made it harder to cast the United States as omnipotent, omniscient and self-actualizing. But judging by the reactions to the recent protests in Myanmar, also known as Burma, the commentariat hasn't stopped ascribing otherworldly powers to ambitious governments. It's just that they're choosing different governments.

The "shame and misery of the Burmese junta," claimed Christopher Hitchens in Slate, will endure just "as long as the embrace of China persists." Hitchens isn't the only pundit casting China as puppeteer to the junta. "China must use its 'special relationship' with the junta," explained Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams in the Wall Street Journal, "to arrange the release of Ms. [Aung San] Suu Kyi and hundreds — if not thousands — of other political prisoners." Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has expressed similar sentiments, and various human rights groups are calling for the United States and Europe to boycott the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

But how much sway do Chinese leaders actually hold over Myanmar's famously intransigent, xenophobic military?

"They actually have very limited leverage, as all foreigners do," said William Overholt, who advised the pro-democracy coalition of 21 tribal groups that created the Provisional Revolutionary Government in Burma in 1989 and is now director of Rand's Center for Asia Pacific Policy. "The whole theory of this government is to cut itself off from the world so no one can influence it."

That certainly comes through in the propaganda, which I saw much of during the year and a half I spent living and working in Yangon. Under Burmese law, all printed material must contain a government statement of Burmese nationalist principles under the heading "people's desire." Principle No. 1? "Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views." That message applies to China too: Stooges come in many stripes.

John H. Badgley, a retired Cornell University professor who has studied Myanmar for 50 years, says its rulers are best understood as a nationalist party not easily influenced or bought off. "The notion that some external group can come bludgeon them into behavior modification is just false," he said.

It will take more than talk to undermine the junta - they know that. They act while the west talks. It turns out that China isn't even Burma's biggest trading partner, Thailand is. It is possible that sanctions might create real pressures within Burma, but it would take coordinated efforts for them to be meaningful. China and Russia are resisting UN action and the European Union is holding trade seminars. So it is extremely unlikely that those sanctions will be forthcoming. It is terribly frustrating.

Anger At The Coronation

Toby Harndon at the Telegraph looks at the media's coronation of Hillary! Clinton as the inevitable winner of the Democratic nomination and finds plenty of people who are less than happy about it.

This has been the week of Hillary the Inevitable. She has broken the political equivalent of the sound barrier by surging past the 50 per cent mark in a national poll. Her fundraising is now outstripping that of Barack Obama, the Young Pretender. Rival political operatives are awestruck by the efficiency of her campaign.

But are the Democrats already experiencing buyer's remorse? "I've contributed to her in the past, I think she'd be a million times better than Bush but I don't like this coronation," one major party donor told me with a grimace at an Embassy Row function. "Maybe it's the dynasty thing. Maybe it's the control factor. Maybe it's just that she doesn't feel like change to me."

The American commentariat has simultaneously crowned the former First Lady and begun pelting her with rotten fruit. At a private gathering of pundits and pollsters recently, all nine declared in a straw poll that Mrs Clinton would win not only the Democratic nomination but the White House as well.

Then columnists from The New York Times, that most reliable bastion of the liberal establishment, formed the vanguard of an assault against her. "Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar [an elite college founded for women]," sniffed Maureen Dowd.

Her colleague Gail Collins wrote of Mrs Clinton's talent for knowing "how to string together the maximum number of weasel words in one sentence".

Peggy Noonan slammed the dynasty system yesterday that would see a Clinton Succeed a Bush yet again. There is a bit of a backlash building against Clinton's early coronation - and that is a good thing. The system already favors the candidate with the most money. Early coronations before a single vote is cast are actually meaningless. Gore was supposed to be pretty much a shoo-in as was Kerry. The press gets these things wrong more often than they get it right. Harndon closes with a warning:

It may seem to be all over bar the voting. But the campaign still has months to run and elections have a nasty habit of upsetting both conventional wisdom and the best-laid plans.

And that is really the beauty of the system, isn't it?

Real Costs

Kimberley Strassel writes about a talk she had recently with Representative John Dingell of Michigan. Dingell is scaring the heck out of his fellow Democrats by holding their collective feet to the fire by opposing quick - and useless - climate initiatives. He insists that if they are going to do something it can't be dishonest and it can't be done by destroying one industry.

Such tenacity might explain why his own party is alternating between fury and worry over Mr. Dingell's role in today's great energy debate. Democrats took over Congress vowing to make global warming a top priority, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to notch a quick victory with a bill that was long on political symbolism and cost, if short on actual emissions reductions.

Standing in her way has been Mr. Dingell. Much to the speaker's consternation, the powerful chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee is insisting that any bill should actually accomplish something, and that its pain be borne by all Americans (rather than just his Detroit auto makers). In recent months he has been circulating his own proposals for hefty new taxes on energy, gasoline and homeowners–ideas that are already giving the rest of his party the willies.

His position arguably makes Mr. Dingell the lone honest broker in the global warming debate. But it also makes him a headache for all his Democratic friends, who'd prefer he just play political nice. For his part, the 81-year-old Dean of the House–as feisty and courtly and colorful a congressman as you'll ever find–is unrepentant.

"I wasn't sent down here to destitute [my district]. And I wasn't sent down here to destitute anyone else. . . . I've got a responsibility to legislate, but I've got a responsibility to legislate well. I'm going to be honest with the American people about this and say 'look here, fellas, this is what we're going to have to do to you to fix global warming. You tell us whether you like it or not.' "

Read it all, it actually is fascinating. Longtime readers know that I am highly skeptical of the claims being made by the Al Gore brigades. They also know that I have pointed out the rampant fraud in a lot of the so-called climate initiative - many of which do considerably more harm than good. What Dingell is proposing, cap-and-trade system, huge carbon tax, massive increase in fuel taxes and an elimination of tax deductions for homes over 3,000 square feet are downright draconian. But it illustrates the reality of what will happen to the American economy. He isn't buying into the quick and dirty bogus fixes that many Democrats are. They hate him for it.

Regardless of what the alarmists say, the debate is not settled on the issue of man's involvement in global warming. It is imperative that we not rush, lemming-like, over the global warming cliff without understanding the true costs involved and the real economic damage that will result. Al Gore has financial interests in the acceptance of his theories. That alone should be making people question what is going on.

Instant Grand Canyon

Just add water. An instant canyon created in Texas in 2002 when water flooded out of a spillway is being opened to the public. The Canyon Lake Gorge was created in the space of three and a half days and is up to 80 feet deep and a mile and a half long.

The mile-and-a-half-long gorge, up to 80 feet deep, was dug out from what had been a nondescript valley covered in mesquite and oak trees. It sits behind a spillway built as a safety valve for Canyon Lake, a popular recreation spot in the Texas Hill Country between San Antonio and Austin.

The reservoir was built in the 1960s to prevent flash flooding along the Guadalupe River and to assure the water supply for central Texas. The spillway had never been overrun until July 4, 2002, when 70,000 cubic feet of water gushed downhill toward the Guadalupe River for three days, scraping off vegetation and topsoil and leaving only limestone walls.

"Underneath us, it looks solid, but obviously it's not," said Tommie Streeter Rhoad of the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority, as she looked out over a cream-colored limestone crevasse.

The sudden exposure of such canyons is rare but not unprecedented. Flooding in Iowa in 1993 opened a limestone gorge behind a spillway at Corvalville Lake north of Iowa City, but that chasm, Devonian Fossil Gorge, is narrower and shallower than Canyon Lake Gorge.

Neither compares to the world's most famous canyon. It took water around 5 million to 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon, which plunges 6,000 feet at its deepest point and stretches 15 miles at its widest.

The more modest Canyon Lake Gorge still displays a fault line and rock formations carved by water that seeped down and bubbled up for millions of years before the flooding.

I can attest that water is unbelievably powerful when it decides it wants to go somewhere. It can do an awe-inspiring amount of damage in a very short time indeed. There is a website for the gorge: http://www.canyongorge.org/. Not much in the way of photos there, however. There is a pretty good photo here, however. There is a pretty decent gallery of pictures here courtesy of the local Chamber of Commerce.

One question. If this gorge was cut in 3-1/2 days, how sure are they that it took millions of years for the Grand Canyon? Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it?